Carry on Nurse (1959) - film review

Ted York and Bernie Bishop are the latest admissions to a men’s ward in a busy London hospital, the former a reporter with appendicitis, the latter a boxer with a fractured hand.   Their ward brothers include Oliver Reckitt, an aspiring nuclear physicist, Percy Hickson, who fell off a scaffold, and Jack Bell, a man whose bunion is ruining his love life.   Patients and nurses alike live in mortal dread of the daily visit from Matron, which makes life especially hard for the accident prone student nurse Dawson.   Whilst Ted falls hopelessly in love with his nurse, Jack becomes increasingly anxious to get his operation over and done with.  One evening, having got himself and his fellow patients drunk on champagne, Jack persuades Oliver to remove his bunion...

The surprising success of Carry On Sergeant (1958) led producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas to immediately begin work on another ensemble comedy in the same irreverent mould.  Having mercilessly lampooned the army and national service, Rogers and Thomas decided to send up another great British institution, the health service.  Carry On Nurse was the second in what was to become one of the most popular and longest-running film series ever made.  It was here that the Carry On format began to take shape, with its trademark bawdy humour and recurring cast of popular regulars.  And it was a format that was an instant hit with the cinema-going public.  Carry On Nurse was the most commercially successful of all the Carry On films (it was in fact the biggest grossing British film of 1959) and its producer and director were not slow in realising what they had created, nothing less than a British cinema phenomenon.  The series would run for 29 films over a 20 year period.

Like Carry On Sergeant before it, Carry On Nurse was adapted from a play, Ring For Catty by Patrick Cargill and Jack Beale.  The script was written by Norman Hudis, one of the best of the series’ contributors, who worked on several of the early Carry On films.  Although the film is lacking in plot and structure, essentially consisting of a series of vignettes of varying degrees of hilarity, it does have some memorable moments.  Hattie Jacques is the archetypal matron, ruling the wards like a Stalinist dictator, able to crush dissent with the merest inflection of her eyebrow.  A manic Kenneth Williams looks like he is about to carve the Sunday joint as he sharpens the knives for an improvised bunion operation.  This is where Leslie Phillips gets to say "Ding, dong..." for the first time.  And then there’s the fun with the daffodil...  To see how this innocent little flower caused a national sensation you have to watch the film.  The Carry On team had arrived, and, like a bunged up interior, it must have seemed that nothing would shift them...

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The Carry On films:
1. Carry On Sergeant (1958)
2. Carry On Nurse (1959)
3. Carry On Teacher (1959)
4. Carry On Constable (1960)
5. Carry On Regardless (1961)
6. Carry On Cruising (1962)
7. Carry On Cabby (1963)
8. Carry On Jack (1963)
9. Carry On Spying (1964)
10. Carry On Cleo (1964)
11. Carry On Cowboy (1966)
12. Carry On Screaming! (1966)
13. Don’t Lose Your Head (1966)
14. Follow That Camel (1967)
15. Carry On Doctor (1967)
16. Carry On Up the Khyber (1968)
17. Carry On Camping (1969)
18. Carry On Again Doctor (1969)
19. Carry On Up the Jungle (1970)
20. Carry On Loving (1970)
21. Carry On Henry (1971)
22. Carry On at Your Convenience (1971)
23. Carry On Matron (1972)
24. Carry On Abroad (1972)
25. Carry On Girls (1973)
26. Carry On Dick (1974)
27. Carry On Behind (1975)
28. Carry On England (1976)
29. That’s Carry On (1977)
30. Carry On Emmannuelle (1978)
31. Carry On Columbus (1992)


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